Now that the media and blogging community has had first dibs on covering my latest project, it’s time to talk about it here.

Reprogramming The City: Opportunities for Urban Infrastructure is a global overview of ways in which existing urban infrastructure is being re-imagined, re-purposed and re-invented to do more in the city. It’s a collection of ideas of how cities can do more with the structures and systems they already have. The exhibition is on at Boston Society of Architects’ BSA Space Gallery until September 29, 2013.

The exhibition is an illustration of my belief that the city holds a vast amount of untapped ability. The structures, surfaces, objects and systems that underpin its daily operations have the potential to do more, to perform an alternate function, or assume an entirely new role in the mechanism of the city.

Reprogramming The City explores a new paradigm of urban creativity and resourcefulness that treats the hardware of the city as a platform of opportunity, and infrastructure not as the end result of a previous creative process, but the beginning of a new one.

Reprogramming the City is a collection of some of the best ideas I’ve found in cities around the world that apply resourceful strategies to the existing physical assets of the city. The projects highlighted in Reprogramming the City go beyond being just aesthetic improvements for the city – they represent a new innovative and resourceful approach, transforming the existing physical assets of the city into vehicles to benefit public health, movement, communication, social cohesion and environmental concerns.

The notion of reprogramming our relationship with the city, and the role design in the city, has always been at the center of the urban design projects I’ve created and directed over the years. A couple years ago I began a wide-ranging research project exploring how a new spirit of resourcefulness was emerging in cities everywhere. This exhibition is the first of many projects that will come out of my ongoing research in this field.

Reprogramming the City isn’t only a display of projects from other cities, it is also a lab of sorts for new prototypes for reprogramming existing urban assets. City Tickets by Mayo Nissen (pictured at right, below) is one such prototyped project being launched in the exhibition. The City of Boston provided a Multispace Parking Pay Machine for Nissen to literally reprogram to provide a model for how the machines could serve an additional function in the city beyond just dispensing units of time for parking.

City Tickets (far right) and idea station for ideas for future parking meter use.

Nissen’s reprogrammed parking pay machine now integrates with the city’s 311 incident/fault reporting system, offering the public an opportunity to print out a list of incidents or faults in the city that have been reported in the area surrounding the machine (broken street lights, potholes in need of repair), and a real-time response from the city as to how the incidents are being responded to. Users can also print out a form for them to submit a new incident or fault report, or simply offer a suggestion for improvements for the area. To the side of the City Tickets prototype is an area for visitors to the gallery to submit their own ideas for what future parking pay machines could do, or be, in the city.

Visitors with a keen eye will realize there are more assets within the exhibition from the City of Boston than just the parking machine. It was very important to me when designing the show that the exhibition be of the city and not just about the city. All display structures, signage and freestanding images are actual street signs, posts, foundations and assorted physical materials provided directly by the City of Boston’s operations department. When visitors are done seeing the displays in the first section of the exhibition, turn around and look behind you. The building blocks of the exhibition – particularly the material on which the images are mounted – then become clear:

Looking behind the first section of the exhibition, printed on Boston street signs.

And all information panels for each item on display are printed directly on repurposed street signs:

The first group of info panels, printed on Boston street signs.

Reprogramming the City: Opportunities for Urban Infrastructure is on view at the Boston Society of Architects BSA Space Gallery, 290 Congress Street, Boston, until September 29, 2013. More information can be found here.